This is the work blog for the KDE Visual Design Group a group of dedicated designers striving to improve community participation in design for KDE as well as design work in general for KDE applications and Plasma.

måndag 19 maj 2014

Monday Report: Deluxe Edition!

In which we talked about the "Conspiracy of the Missing Monday Report", a short thing about the Beta and then some screenshots of where we're heading concerning themes and icons and then talk some more about participation and how much it means.

I forgot.

I know, I know, no Monday Report last week - lets just keep it at "its been kinda hectic lately", "I forgot" and move on. Monday reports are continuing no matter what so don't worry about that. :)
So I will post this and then ANOTHER post soon after to delve some more into the work going on with Wallpapers and the wallpaper competition.

To the Long and the Short of it: We have a Beta as most of you have read. What shocked some is that the beta wasn't a major change in visual design. No, it wasn't intended to be. I've said back in January, over and over, "bit-by-bit". This will be a slow change and let me delve into the "why's".
Plasma is a massive project, it has millions of users and a long history. What started as another Linux Desktop Environment has grown and grown with layers and layers of function. Now some of you might say "Well scrap all of them and build it from scratch" and for a mission with less demands that would be true. Plasma is a MASSIVE project for a reason. One of those are that the users who like the way it is NOW should not feel dismissed, another was that changes had to stick to an obvious layout path from KDE4 another that flexibility should never be compromised and a third that "Community" should always be the focus etc etc (or as a friend said when I told him about the project "What, are you stupid? Why are you doing this!?" ;) ). So bear with us, things are changing but we will do it slowly.

Anyway I wanted to show two screen shots of where we're heading. The first one is from Andrew Lake who together with Garthecho (a new VDG member) heads the work on QML and is tied into almost every bit of it. You can see the new window decoration (that needs to be properly ported as right now we have an Aurorae theme for it but Aurorae doesn't play nice in Plasma Next (so if you're a C++ programmer who likes to get his/her hands dirty, tell us!)) and you can see what Plasma looks like too as well as the Widget theme and a few of the Icons.

Under here you can get a nice good look at Uri Herreras icon work so far. Now Uri is one of life's many overworked people who tend to take on quite a load when he gets a chance so if you want to help out with Plasma Next, try to help HIM with his Flattr Icon theme so that he gets more time to do our theme (yes it's as confusing to write as it probably is to read :) )

Please note that they window decorations, Plasma Theme and Widget Themes are for Nitrux OS and not Plasma Next!

Ok so finally about participation - I know since things move slowly it might be tricky and many seem to think that they are being overlooked or that no devs are checking their work. Trust me, nothing could be further from the truth. It's just that things WILL move slowly. We're working on Plasma Next. That means that when this Beta is out the door we will still be working on its refined state. Plasma as it will be in June, is not the final product. It's just the first iteration of it and my intention is that when this year ends the changes will be visible to all.

The second scrot looks better, mostly because of the window deco. A window deco that looks like it was themed entirely independently of every other window element looks out of place. Is the color hardcoded? What if one uses a dark color scheme that is a total mismatch with the deco?

The colors of the theme are based on the color scheme chosen and the goal is to have window decorations do the same. The reason why we moved away from using something that was more identical is due to the weight given to the applications and the application windows and we needed them to stand out to be more accessible.

The window decoration uses the current selected color scheme, which includes the window titlebar colors. We'll provide a Breeze-Light color scheme with the window titlebar colors the same as the window background color (similar to the second screenshot) for folks who prefer that look.

1) The blue line on the top of the current active window in the taskbar is just an ugly thing in my opinion, and it doesn't make any sense and I hope it's removable.

2) The new way of adding widgets (using the left side of the screen) while being perhaps more accessible it looks terrible, again, this is my opinion and I hope this can be changed too.

3) I have seen screenshots of the KF5 Beta and I see that KickOff is incredibly big together with the calendar also in higher resolutions, what is this? a bug? or an intended design? As always, I hope it can be modified.

Thanks for reading this and sorry for my bad English, it's not my native language.

As for 1: well you can always change the theme which would remove it.As for 2: I have no idea tbh.As for 3: They are bigger in the next version but you can resize them just like you can today. The difference is that they are bigger by default.

The icons and tab bars are a bit angular (boxy) in my opinion. Can we see higher-resolution images? For some reason all the fonts appear blurred (either compression artefacts or scaling; I have to scale at 200%+ to read the text on this screen). And I worry that on a high-res screen those folder icons will look even more box-like — too long straight lines!